Conventional agriculture for cultivating plants requires an aisle for people to move between plants in order to grow and harvest plants in soil. Hence techniques for such conventional agriculture based on soil culture have problems of low land-use efficiency and uneven growth among the plants depending on where the plants are planted.
Patent Literature 1 (PTL 1) exemplifies a technique to cultivate plants using containers holding cultivation beds such as water and soil, with the containers placed on a circulating conveyor. This allows intensive planting and harvesting at a single site and eliminates the need for aisles which a grower moves on, contributing to an increase in land-use efficiency.
The cultivation in the technique involves fertilization and irrigation carried out by cultivating apparatuses distributed at multiple locations above the conveyor used for circulating the containers.
In the above case of a so-called vegetable factory, plants would be grown using artificial light instead of sunlight. For example, some vegetable factories use LEDs which emit red light and blue light for growing their plants and encouraging the plants to photosynthesize and produce vitamin.